Social Media Predicts Leicester Cinderella Story In English Premier League

The biggest anticipated Cinderella story in sports and soccer is playing out, as Leicester City is predicted to win the English Premier League within the next three weekends. The “Foxes” could be crowned champions as early as this Sunday if they beat the 5th highest valued sports team in the world, Manchester United, or if 2nd place Tottenham loses on Monday. If not, there are two more games after that, but either way Leicester City will be the likely winner as there are 9 points at stake and Leicester City is already 7 points ahead of 2nd place Tottenham. [Update: Leicester City indeed became champion on May 2!]

This bizarre and unprecedented story of David against many Goliaths is quite remarkable! Leicester City is a small town in England with a population of 500,000, and its soccer team has yearly revenues of $150 million dollars. This is in contrast with Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Arsenal, and Liverpool, which are each worth billions and ranked by Forbes in the top 8 of the world's most valuable soccer teams.

Just in 2015, Leicester City and its players were considered second tier, ending 14th in the League with 41 points. But it is now pretty evident they will win this year, and likely double the points. How can that be? And why am I so confident that what seemed a very unlikely outcome a few months ago will indeed materialize?

Well, I got my hands on some rich data on social media activity about the Premier League, which has all along shown that Leicester City will win. The positive sentiment could already be sensed back in February, when there were 24,000 resounding tweets per minute as Algerian-born Riyad Mahrez, just crowned the League's best player, put Leicester 2-0 up against Manchester City.

Then, since March 24 there have been 1.5 million
Facebookinteractions about Leicester City, including 300,000 interactions alone on April 10, when they beat Sunderland 2-0. Over the last two weeks, Leicester City was the 8th most mentioned English soccer team on Facebook, with reigning champion Chelsea coming in at No. 10. What’s amazing is that even today on Facebook-land, Leicester is still a small team. Chelsea has an official page with 45 million likes, compared to Leicester’s meager 3.5 million.

Source: Twitter mentions by week of team keywords along discussion of winning the league/title. The blue and light green lines represent positive sentiment about Leicester City and Tottenham winning the League, respectively.

Twitter comments since the League started in September paint the bigger, most compelling picture on the predictive power of social media and the good news for Leicester fans. It turns out all along since December, global tweets have predicted Leicester’s victory (in the graph above, it's where Leicester's blue line breaks away from Tottenham's line). So even back in late 2015, when the best sports analysts rationally predicted that second tier Leicester City would eventually fall from first place, tweets gave the edge to Leicester over Tottenham on who would win the League!

So, it turns out the wisdom of the social media crowds beat the 5,000-to-1 odds that Leicester would not win. This reminds me of the
RationalExpectations Hypothesis in economics, which suggests that the expectations of all individuals in an economy are, on average, better predictors of the future than that of a particular individual, including experts.

Social media platforms are ripe to test this hypothesis, because of their massive reach. For example, a recent academic study that analyzed sentiment of tweets about candidates in the last U.S. election correctly predicted Barack Obama as the winner. And the fact that social media users on aggregate have consistently bet--against all odds--on the biggest Cinderella story in sports history is a testament to their predictive power.

The rise of Leicester City is truly a Cinderella story, except that this is a modern day fairytale as social media has predicted victory all along. And in April, after Leicester's latest miraculous last-minute tie to West Ham and Tottenham's unexpected tie against West Brom, positive sentiment about Leicester City's win has taken off (see right side of graph). Sorry Tottenham fans, but powerful predictive analytics of social media interactions show your team has no chance.